After reaching out to the Play team, their feedback was that though application itself is harmless, and not actually in violation of their Terms of Service, since it 'encourages users to void their warranty', it would not be allowed to remain in the store.

While Google does have somewhat of a point - somewhat, somewhere, hidden deep inside - this is just entirely needless. I'm probably overly paranoid, but what are the chances that Samsung Google's OEM partners applied some pressure? CM is insanely popular, and once you have a taste of proper, crapware, TouchWiz-less Android, you don't want to go back.

There are other "side effects" to installing CM or any other third-party ROM other than voiding the warranty on one's phone. Some of a phone's very important basic functionality may be missing or not work at all. I put CM 10.2 on my AT&T GS3 SGH I747, and while I really enjoy not having Samsung's bloat/crap-ware, I have no LTE functionality. The phone will not access AT&T's LTE network, and evidently the only way to bring that back is to put the stock ROM back on the phone. You can't change any setting anywhere to make the thing access LTE. Nowhere in CM's documentation does it warn you about that little missing feature. So I can see why Google is doing this, they don't want customers to be surprised and find that a major part of their phone no longer works.